Smoke
by Kaiser Washington
Summary: Rukawa agrees to see Sendoh at a café three years after breaking up with him, and is shocked to see what the latter has become. One-shot. SenRuMit. Psychopath Sendoh. Rated T for dark themes.


Summary: Rukawa agrees to see Sendoh at a café three years after breaking up with him, and is shocked to see what the latter has become. One-shot. SenRuMit. Psychopath Sendoh. Rated T for dark themes.

A/N: I consider this to be the same sort of quasi-AU absurdist story as Atonement. The characters and their stories are all the same, but the story still takes place in a world that isn't quite the world of the series.

This was previously rated M, but on rereading I realized it wasn't as dark as I had thought.

* * *

 **Smoke**

Rukawa sat uncomfortably straight in his chair outside the café, coffee untouched. Why had he ordered it anyway? He didn't drink coffee. It might have been the piercing gaze the other had cast at him inside the shop that had made him buy it. The smile on his face had been the same as the one he was wearing now. Something seemed so awfully off about it, but Rukawa couldn't put his finger on what. Never mind that the Sendoh he knew was never liable to fall into the smoking habit. That was too much Mitsui's thing.

Sendoh tried to blow a smoke ring, and failed, and stared contemptuously after the gray cloud that he had puffed out of his abused lungs as it diffused into the tired evening air. He was smiling, as usual, but it looked more like a sneer. Sendoh had never sneered at anyone before, no matter how worked up he had been. And his usually relaxed bearing looked unnatural today, as if he were trying to hide his languidness behind airs. Or smoke.

"Do you still play basketball?" Rukawa asked, shifting uncomfortably. Why was he so stiff? His back was starting to hurt from sitting up straight the whole time. Sendoh hadn't said one threatening thing to him all afternoon. He had been nothing but nice, a clinical observer might think. But Rukawa felt a strange foreboding that he somehow couldn't shake off.

"I do, once in a while."

Rukawa winced. It was as he had feared. Sendoh had gone beyond his reach.

Sendoh flicked the butt of his still-smoldering cigarette out into the street, and proceeded immediately to light another. He coughed, but contrived to turn it into a laugh in the same breath, if it could still be called a breath.

"You can probably tell that I get tired very easily these days."

Rukawa chose to look away. There was something in Sendoh's self-pitying that sounded so terribly like an accusation. And Rukawa knew it was an accusation, because he knew that it was partly his fault that Sendoh had ended up like this. It was his guilt that had brought him back.

"You still with Mitsui?" The sharpness of Sendoh's blue eyes was no longer there, but it chose to come back at the most inconvenient times, adding to the pointedness of his questions, and making it difficult not to answer them.

Rukawa nodded slowly. He instinctively wrapped his fingers around his coffee, and shivered. It was an awful feeling, to be sensible of the sickly coldness of the drink and Sendoh's gelid fury at the same time. With some firmness he said, "I won't let you say bad things about Hisashi today. And I think it's just as wrong for you to be jealous of him today as it was three years ago."

Sendoh leant in, and sneered in that terrible way that made his face look so much like that of a snake.

"Why would I be jealous of anyone?" he hissed, eyes narrowing. "I don't _love_ you, Rukawa. Never have, never will."

Silently Rukawa recalled all the impassioned love letters he had grown used to finding in his mailbox every morning. They had initially been enchanting, but had gradually begun to betray a diseased sort of neurosis. Sendoh had seemed capable of killing anyone who got in his way in those days, and Rukawa had been forced to cut off all connection with him.

Sendoh grinned.

"I _want_ you. But that's not love." Sendoh spat on the sidewalk. Then he turned to Rukawa, and grinned again. "I still remember the texture of your lips. I could draw them, if I had any skill for drawing. As it happens, I don't have the patience either. I must have you, Rukawa."

The only thing keeping him from pouncing on Rukawa was probably the realization that he didn't possess a fraction of the strength needed to overpower him.

Why was Rukawa still sitting here? He didn't have to listen to this madman talk.

"Incidentally," Sendoh went on casually, lighting his fourth cigarette of the afternoon, "you don't have to worry about Mitsui anymore. There was a guy who owed me a favor, and—uh…" Sendoh gave his wrist a couple of quick flicks, as if brushing aside something invisible in the air.

Rukawa's eyes widened. His heart began beating faster, and heat pooled around his neck and in his extremities in spite of the cold winter air.

"What are you saying?"

"Don't worry, I'll make sure they say nice things at the service. Maybe even put up his junior high MVP picture with all the rest. I won't go myself." Sendoh looked embarrassed. "Much as I'd love to. Say hello to his mother for me, won't you? Tell her I missed seeing her at Christmas these past two years, and—"

Sendoh's eyes widened.

Rukawa's hands were at his throat in a flash, knuckles turning white inside his gloves as his fingers tightened around Sendoh's thin neck.

"You insect," said Rukawa through clenched teeth.

Sendoh's dying gasps emerged like the hisses of a snake.

Rukawa got up and ran as other customers and passersby began screaming and rushing over to Sendoh's lifeless body slumped over the back of the chair.

He didn't regret it.

end.


End file.
